AnandTech Analyses BD DRM and Cinavia

[sholling]

This is a pretty interesting article on piracy, conventional DRM, Cinavia, and the wisdom of inconveniencing your paying customers. My feeling is that while the studios are well aware that they will never stop commercial pirates, they seemed to determined to make life rough on paying customers. The college kids that are willing to spend a week downloading a single ripped BD ISO aren't going to run out and buy the movie either way. If they had the money to buy it they wouldn't tying up their connection for a week. Instead they should save the cost of DRM and pass on the cost savings so that we can all buy more movies.

Link

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is intended to protect media from being played in an unauthorized manner. However, more often than not, it fails to serve the purpose. Many people in the content industry are fully aware that it is not possible to stop media piracy. They view DRM as a method to slow down the pirates. The panel discussion on anti-piracy measures at the HPA 2011 Tech Retreat compared this to using a key to lock a car, even though a thief with proper equipment could still steal it.

 

[jinjuku]

I love the over all message about the copy protection measures:

If the player doesn't have those measures built in... Then they don't rear their ugly head.

All on the eve of Kaliedescape losing on Appeal and then one day later Wal.mart and the studios announcing their kind offer of hosting your movie collection on the VUDU cloud.

Telling you this is a legalized Mafia protection scheme.

 

[Grador]

An interesting read, I was unaware of the Cinavia protection scheme.

I am constantly amazed and annoyed at the amount of time and money DRM costs me. I buy and rip blu-rays to hard drive, and half the time when I purchase a new release I have to wait for my ripping software to be updated with a new scheme. So in a constant cycle of futility the studios are paying cryptographers to update their protection, and then software developers are doing the same to decrypt, costing me money at both ends so that I can simply playback a movie the way I want to.

I actually disagree with one of the assertions in the article. I reencode all of my movies with slightly higher compression, getting them down to ~7 gig a movie stored in .mkv files. The article seems to think that this is not legitimate of me and I should only ever store ISOs. I feel no need to keep around the extra features, and find that at this file size I have lost very little video quality, while saving quite a bit on HDDs.

Edit: Almost forgot to mention how annoying firmware updates are. Seriously, screw firmware updates.

 

[jinjuku]

.ISO is nice for restoring to physical media. I read the article and didn't get the same message about shrinking and storing to MKV.

Actually they are quite exited by the prospect:

The icing on the cake is multi-OS support. MakeMKV even has a version for Linux!

 

[Grador]

Users with legitimate backups wanting the full Blu-ray experience and using such players will end up being affected. Our main aim with this piece is to appeal to the Blu-ray industry to consider personal backups as fair use and exempt ISO capable DMAs from Cinavia.

We hope the industry sees reason with the argument that ISOs are not the preferred medium for pirates. Instead, it is files in MKV format with sizes ranging from 4 to 20 GB that are most popular. The latter category is not played back with Cinavia enabled players, and hence, Cinavia is rendered useless

I was referring to this passage. At other times they do talk about making MKV's, but in their arguments about who DRM hurts they talk about them as if they are a tool off pirates.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Well, Technically if you "backup" your BD disk into very high bitrate 1080p video and original soundtrack - you should still be able to play this video with open source tools regardless if the sound was watermarked or not

But hardware clients - that's a different story - I can see many next gen will have to drop support for BD playback or cancel the product all together.

You'll have to pry my netgear Neo-550 from my cold dead hands

 

[sholling]

I was referring to this passage. At other times they do talk about making MKV's, but in their arguments about who DRM hurts they talk about them as if they are a tool off pirates.

Their statement actually makes a lot of sense because uploading/downloading a 25-50GB file would take forever. On the other hand a 7gb MKV makes more sense for piracy for the same reason that it makes more sense to you for your legitimate archiving purposes - size. Personally I'd just as soon store ISOs because I own the original discs and only want to store stuff I want to want fairly often on hard drives. In other words my favorites.

While it would be nice to be able to rip and store full quality BDs for "extra" free movie night playback I can live with just ISOs. I think it's time for a legal ban on any DRM that limits backups to ISO, and at the same time a law allows us to skip trailers. In the mean time they should have to clearly label any movie infected with Cinavia.